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Monday, January 28, 2013

Roadblock..

Last week I got an email from my sister's former teacher, asking me to make a baby quilt for her new goddaughter. Of course I accepted immediately, figuring I would have some time to find the perfect design and colors to match her request... then she told me the Christening was February 17th. Okay, no problem I can handle that... except i'm 6,000 miles away and need to give myself a week for shipping.. okay, starting to panic now. Thankfully, Honey Honey arrives last week and it fit what she wanted perfectly!
Friday night I cut my materials, sewed my HST's and spent more of the evening trimming a bajillion pieces.. ugh!

Saturday I pieced all the blocks and basted the quilt... then... roadblock.

How the heck do I quilt this!? My FMQ skills are sub par and I don't want to mess this up! I can manage some simple stippling but nothing too crazy. I was thinking something like this one but I can't decide! Advice please?!

I need to get this quilted this week and in the mail early next week so any and all help is greatly appreciated!!!

17 comments:

First of all, yay for Honey Honey!! My FQ bundle is arriving this week :D Secondly, I love Janice's quilting - she's talented! If you have time, you could do that kind of quilting - diagonal lines through the "squares" in between your stars, and then inner echo quilting around the inside of the stars?? Good luck!

I would stitch in the ditch around each star and then echo 1/4" inside each coloured piece of the star and leave them at that. Then if you can stipple you could do another 1/4" or 1/2" (I'm not sure of the size of your stars!) echo around the white squares formed between the stars and fill those with stippling. By doing the echo of those shapes first it will make your stippled areas more defined. Well that's what I would do anyway! Hope you get finished in time!

I'd say echo quilt inside the negative space that forms the white squares - both the large squares and the on-point ones. And then inside one set of the colors that make up the star points, so it'll bring attention to one of the pinwheels. Or if you're feeling really crazy I bet it would look cool to straight line quilt in all the white spaces, with nothing on the stars, so they pop out a lot from the background. But that would be a lot of starting and stopping...

Hoe about on the diagonals through the centre of each star and the white squares (which would hit several stars with one line) then do the verticals/horizontals through the centre of each star (again several starts hit with one line), plus between the stars? That would be a quick solution...

I'd do a "x" through the whole thing (ie. top left corner down to bottom right corner, and same from the top right to bottom left), then divide those again so you end up with 8 quadrants, then echo quilt in each quadrant. Similar to how I did this mini: http://craftingdotdotdot.blogspot.ca/2012/03/modern-mini-challenge-and-its-giveaway.html Doing a design on each star would be nice too but it would not be as fast because there would be a lot more starts/stops and turning.

I would do wavy line quilting in one direction. My bernina has it as a preset stitch. Crazy Mom Quilts also just featured the stitch. The quilting goes fast because it is only one direction. It adds a little texture to the quilt and secures it for multiple machine washings (as baby quilts that are used requires). See my example here: http://bigmamaquilts.com/?p=264 and Crazy Mom Quilts here: http://crazymomquilts.blogspot.com/2013/01/chopped-rhubarb.html

Good Luck and I can't wait to see the finish! Great fabrics for the stars :)

I love the quilting in the link and think that would look great! But what if you just stitched in the ditch or outline quilted to tie everything down and than quilted something in each of the squares between the stars? I had a star quilt once where I (machine) embroidered big flowers in that space (http://smalltownstitcher.blogspot.com/2012/03/another-friday-finish.html) Just a thought...Just an idea...

Don't worry! You quilt is going to be beautiful. :) BTW I really like the straight-line quilting in the grey example quillt. You could also just do diagonal straight lines if you wanted to go simple. Good luck!